I mentioned that when John Singleton directed really stupid films (which he made fun) they had other writers. Allow me to specify that those movies are Rosewood, Four Brothers, Abduction, and - to a lesser extent - 2 Fast 2 Furious, because that one did what it was supposed to do. I can't argue with that.
I'm also not going to pick on Abduction too much. Once someone decides that they want to do a mashup of The Face on the Milk Carton and The Bourne Identity and cast Taylor Lautner in it, then you just have to be glad that Singleton was the director, because it probably could have been much worse.
However, there was something I noticed about the other two.
Rosewood - Based on a true story of the massacre of Black people and the burning of their homes. Throws in a bunch of dumb testosterone and focuses on the white characters. Written by Gregory Poirier, a white guy, born in Hawaii. He also wrote the National Treasure sequel.
Four Brothers - Loosely inspired by The Sons of Katie Elder, and written by two white English guys, who made two of the brothers white and two Black but wanted to show that race didn't matter, except that it does, and two English guys are not likely to know how that would play out. They also worked on the G.I. Joe movie.
There was definitely the potential for a better and more honest telling of the story of what happened in Rosewood, Florida in January 1923.
Not having seen the original Sons of Katie Elder - also based on a true story - I don't know what the story potential is there.
However, I feel confident that there were things missed because the people writing had things they assumed they knew well enough, but did not.
(See, this is where what seems to be about movies is relating more to the posts from earlier in the week, on privilege and such.)
Now we are going to talk about a flaw in John Singleton's work, even though I like him a lot and think he was a good director.
While there were a lot of things that struck me about Higher Learning, what most made me want to listen to the director commentary was for Deja, played by Tyra Banks.
She is an achiever, running track, seeing to her own grades while also helping Malik with his school work, and making him attend the peace festival building toward greater racial understanding, where she is shot, the only person besides the shooter to die, even though there were certainly plenty of other people to shoot.
Then, at the memorial, the white woman who organized the event is sad, blaming herself, and Malik comforts her.
That just seemed so emblematic of so much today, and I needed to know if he knew it.
One really interesting thing about that was that if Kristy Swanson could have opened herself up more emotionally, Singleton would have had Malik hug Kristen. Since the actress could not, the character just got a pat.
The thing is, Malik said he lost his girlfriend. She's the only casualty that wasn't self-inflicted. This seems like a situation where Kristen should be offering comfort to Malik. She is too caught up in herself.
That felt real, but why did it have to be the Black woman who died? Why was she the expendable one?
There is a lot in that, but this was something that was in the commentary. Singleton thought about what would affect him the most, and it would be losing his girlfriend, who at the time was Tyra Banks.
The term "fridging" comes from comic books, specifically from when Green Lantern Kyle Rayner (there have been a lot of Green Lanterns) found his girlfriend had been murdered and stuffed in the fridge. That is one event, but it was part of a larger pattern of women getting raped, murdered, and de-powered to serve as plot devices to move forward the male heroes' revenge or fall or character development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators
The term came from comics, but the concept can be applied to a lot of media.
There are some things that Singleton got very right. When Malik's dorm roommate gets offended that Malik is moving out after the first gun incident with Remy, saying "I'm not like them!", his anger and focus on self rather than empathy for Malik's feelings is very real. The portrayal of the cops - even really nice-seeming ones - automatically treating the students differently based on color is too accurate and very frustrating. The way Remy is groomed and radicalized by Neo-Nazis is very real, including the initial sense he had that he is being preyed on, just not the way he thinks. A lot of it comes from Singleton's college experience.
Even that it is a Black woman who keeps trying to help everyone and ends up losing her life for it has a certain accuracy, but I don't think that he saw ir in that way.
Some of that may be timing. Frequently I see traces of respectability politics in the work or hear it in the commentary, and I see that it is from 1995 or so, and it's not that surprising.
Let me switch to Poetic Justice, Singleton's second film.
After his debut with Boyz n the Hood - focusing on the men - Singleton wanted to look at the women.
Many girls wrote to him saying that he had captured their experience, so I am sure there is a lot he got right. However, his main character Justice - played by Janet Jackson - is different in a lot of ways. She has inherited a large house and was born when her mother was in law school, so comes from an educated, financially better-off family with high expectations. Then her mother committed suicide, and her grandmother died recently, and she is an only child, and probably most of all, her boyfriend was killed right in front of her. Then people keep wondering why she's always wearing black and never wants to have any fun.
That's real, and it is nice to see her connect to Lucky, and open up, and even better that the Lucky's temporary rejection does not stop her healing. However... it is easy to humanize this dream girl; it would have been more impressive to humanize Lucky's baby mama, Angel.
I suspect it never occurred to Singleton to try.
He might get a little closer with Juanita in Baby Boy, but we never see her side of what happened with Jody's brother, and so it leaves her to be seen as not nurturing enough. Her boyfriend is shown doing more for Jody.
That doesn't make John Singleton a bad man or a bad director. It might mean that he didn't really spend enough time listening to the women around him and hearing their stories. It's a common problem.
It is important to be able to recognize a person's shortcomings without needing to hate them and everything they do.
We will probably get to that soon too.
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